Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability: joint learnings from human-groundwater interactions

Billions of people around the world rely for their everyday existence on groundwater. Its invisibility, however, makes groundwater notoriously difficult
to govern, also complicating efforts to avoid depletion or pollution. This project sets out to comparatively study promising grass-roots initiatives of
people organizing around groundwater in places where pressures on the resource are particularly acute (India, Algeria, Morocco, USA, Chile, Peru,
Tanzania). As these often defy or challenge conventional wisdom, the project's hypothesis is that these initiatives contain creative insights about ways
of dealing with the intrinsic tensions that characterize groundwater governance: between individual and collective interests and between short-term
gains and longer-term sustainability. Focusing on groundwater practices - of knowing, accessing and sharing - we combine qualitative ethnographic
methods with hydrogeological and engineering insights to explore the knowledges, technologies and institutions that characterize these initiatives. Our
aim is to enunciate and normatively assess their logic and functioning in view of tracing overlaps or patterns that allow them to serve as more generic
models for transformations to groundwater sustainability. This effort is inspired by theorizations of water as simultaneously social and natural, builds
on recent critical scholarship on institutions, and has a particular sensitivity to how the distribution and use of groundwater is mediated by
technologies. Our overall aim is to create global action-research collaborations to generate new inspirations for thinking about and dealing with
interconnections and interdependencies between humans and groundwater

In most regions of the world, information relevant to groundwater exploitation is fragmentary and not easily accessible. Besides this epistemic
fragmentation, public awareness regarding sustainable development has focused primarily on global warming issues, such as rising ocean levels or the
condition of glaciers, without making explicit the crucial impact of groundwater overexploitation on rises in sea level (Taylor et al. 2013). Hence we
respond to the urgent need to develop public awareness of the social significance of groundwater practices for human development.
The consortium will organize open workshops in India and the Netherlands and it will promote the project among students and relevant stakeholders
in each country. It will also produce two types of output beyond conventional academic publications in order to reach a broader audience interested
in sustainable development:
1) A 15-to-20-minute educational TED Talk summarizing the main findings of the project by the leader of the project (TED2019).
2) A multilingual website that consolidates the fragmentary information about groundwater provided by relevant stakeholders, an online discussion
forum for cooperation partners and partner projects in different parts of the world, a professional documentary, and a joint book.

We expect these dissemination activities to have not only an educational effect on public audiences regarding the development of a more sustainable
use of groundwater but also a policy impact among stakeholders. This knowledge dissemination is particularly relevant as groundwater governance
failures are often attributed to weak or even non-existent knowledge of local contexts. As the project is based on an innovative focus on
groundwater practices, the new knowledge produced will contribute to the reshaping of policies concerning groundwater governance. Research
findings will be disseminated through existing knowledge and policy networks within each country, which stem from previous and ongoing research
of the different team members. Dissemination is also being planned through a series of policy briefs and popular articles in Spanish, Arabic, French
and Swahili that will contribute to the ongoing (local) debates about the depletion of aquifers.

We will present our research findings to transdisciplinary audiences at various academic conferences (Science and Technology Studies 4S, American
Anthropological Association, Royal Geographical Society, WaterNet Conference) and will prioritize the following top-ranked journals for
publication: 1) Water International, 2) Cultural Anthropology, 3) Science, Technology and Human Values, and 4) Geoforum. The articles will be
drafted to feed into a collective monograph provisionally titled: Transformations to groundwater sustainability: Practical lessons on the social life of
aquifers.
Academically, the project will offer a new conceptual repertoire for theorizing the relevance that local practices play in groundwater governance. In
accordance with Horizon 2020, the potential for knowledge dissemination will be maximized by making the data available online through the project
website. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) will not be protected: project results will be made publicly available to ensure that its impact extends
beyond the duration of the project.